- Mar 1, 2010
- 5
- 0
- 7
I am so distressed. I feel like a baby killer! I'm sure I'd doing a bunch of things wrong and ending up with bad hatches. I have three more batches of hatching eggs coming in the mail this week and I want to get this figured out before I kill them too.
I have a new fan bator that keeps the temps at 100 very consistently. I didn't have high hopes for the first hatch this year because the package came smashed and I was only able to salvage 8 eggs and had to clean them of the resulting goo before setting them. I also had added 4 turkey eggs and 18 chicken eggs. The 8 were hatched in the same bator that they were all incubating in, so although I didn't turn them during the last 3 days, they bator was opened many times to turn the others and add water. Humidity ran 30-50% during the whole time. Of the 8, 1 pipped and started to zip, but quit. He had pipped on the bottom, so I didn't even know he was trying until I went to dispose of the eggs or I would've tried to help. Another one pipped and didn't zip a line; just kept gradually making the pip hole bigger. He worked for almost a whole day until I started gradually helping him out. He survived, but I had to eventually soak him in warm water to get the last bit of shell off of his back.
I tried to correct several obvious problems for the second hatch by getting another fan incubator to use for hatching. The 18 remaining chicken eggs were transferred to the hatcher for the last 3 days. Humidity with both trays full of water was about 58%. The second day of hatch, I opened the bator to mist the eggs and add more water to the trays. This brought the humidity up to about 68% and then it gradually declined back to about 60%. On day 3, I again misted and refilled the trays and had the same resulting humidity. Later that day, I had to leave for a couple of hours and returned to a new chick, completely hatched! He came out really quick and his shell was a perfect zip around the top third with no signs of having had any difficulty. I could also see one other egg had pipped. The next morning, the pipped egg had only managed to zip a little bit. His beak wasn't anywhere near the zip when I tried to help him out and it was clear that he had already died. The pieces that I peeled off to help him were very wet feeling.
I cracked the rest of the eggs when it was apparent nothing else was going to happen. Out of 18, I had 1 live birth; 1 pipped and quit; 3 very well formed but didn't pip; 3 partially formed (one of those smelled very bad when cracked); and the rest had signs of the embryo just started but mostly just runny.
I'm very discouraged that having the hatcher didn't help my hatch rate. Clearly if the chicks are forming, then it must be something I'm doing wrong. I find it ironic, though, that doing so many things wrong with the first hatch had the same result as doing things better with the hatcher. Please help!
I have a new fan bator that keeps the temps at 100 very consistently. I didn't have high hopes for the first hatch this year because the package came smashed and I was only able to salvage 8 eggs and had to clean them of the resulting goo before setting them. I also had added 4 turkey eggs and 18 chicken eggs. The 8 were hatched in the same bator that they were all incubating in, so although I didn't turn them during the last 3 days, they bator was opened many times to turn the others and add water. Humidity ran 30-50% during the whole time. Of the 8, 1 pipped and started to zip, but quit. He had pipped on the bottom, so I didn't even know he was trying until I went to dispose of the eggs or I would've tried to help. Another one pipped and didn't zip a line; just kept gradually making the pip hole bigger. He worked for almost a whole day until I started gradually helping him out. He survived, but I had to eventually soak him in warm water to get the last bit of shell off of his back.
I tried to correct several obvious problems for the second hatch by getting another fan incubator to use for hatching. The 18 remaining chicken eggs were transferred to the hatcher for the last 3 days. Humidity with both trays full of water was about 58%. The second day of hatch, I opened the bator to mist the eggs and add more water to the trays. This brought the humidity up to about 68% and then it gradually declined back to about 60%. On day 3, I again misted and refilled the trays and had the same resulting humidity. Later that day, I had to leave for a couple of hours and returned to a new chick, completely hatched! He came out really quick and his shell was a perfect zip around the top third with no signs of having had any difficulty. I could also see one other egg had pipped. The next morning, the pipped egg had only managed to zip a little bit. His beak wasn't anywhere near the zip when I tried to help him out and it was clear that he had already died. The pieces that I peeled off to help him were very wet feeling.
I cracked the rest of the eggs when it was apparent nothing else was going to happen. Out of 18, I had 1 live birth; 1 pipped and quit; 3 very well formed but didn't pip; 3 partially formed (one of those smelled very bad when cracked); and the rest had signs of the embryo just started but mostly just runny.
I'm very discouraged that having the hatcher didn't help my hatch rate. Clearly if the chicks are forming, then it must be something I'm doing wrong. I find it ironic, though, that doing so many things wrong with the first hatch had the same result as doing things better with the hatcher. Please help!
